The Webby for Good, produced in partnership with WP Engine, is a showcase of Webby-honored projects and campaigns that are promoting social good in the world.

Describe your project. What is it, what was the elevator pitch?

The Project Consent campaign had one purpose: Make the idea of consent incredibly simple for college-aged kids to accept and to look for in their interactions. The message was as simple as “If it’s not yes, it’s no."

What key challenges did you face with this project? And how did you overcome them?

We wanted to make a campaign both genders could support, want to watch and share. The biggest challenge was not to alienate male viewers with an accusatory message, so we approached the conversation differently. We created lighthearted and funny videos of common social and intimate situations, showing how to say no and how to walk away. To make them irresistible, we simplified these further by turning our characters into super cute personified genitals. Besides a brief Instagram setback, interestingly, we didn’t encounter any challenges using genitals in the videos or on social media because people loved the characters so much.

What was the most rewarding aspect of working on your project?

It was really heartwarming to read the supportive and emotional reactions from men and women around the world. Many thanked us and some even wanted to join Project Consent’s team because they believed in our campaign so much.

Why this particular cause as the subject of your project/campaign?

On a personal level, for most of us sexual consent seems like such an important and simple problem to solve—yet no one has done it. We wanted to take a stab at it. In the end, we changed a lot of minds but there’s still a lot of work to be done on the subject.

When working on this project, what were some of the most important conversations you had with your team?

Our most important conversations were about the scenarios themselves. We all shared our personal and intimate stories and realized we had a lot in common. Then it was about how to tell the simplest story that wouldn’t overshadow the importance of the message. Figuring out which body parts to depict and how to use them to get these stories across was crucial to the success of the videos.

What did you learn from working on this project that you didn't know going into it? Did anything come out of it that surprised you, or that you weren't expecting?

The hope was that both genders would see this campaign in a positive way. When it launched, we didn’t have any budget or other means to amplify our reach. So the millions of people who watched it, did so because they really wanted to. Some of our friends even watched it on their own without us telling them about it. That was really cool.